Today is World Elephant Day and we thought there was no better time to take a look at the state of Africa’s elephants. To find out how the largest living land animals are faring we spoke with Mike Chase, conversation biologist and founder of the non-profit organization Elephants Without Borders. Starting in 2014, Mike lead the Great Elephant Census, a groundbreaking two-year study that […]

It has been less than a year since the second largest barrier reef in the world, located off the coast of Belize, was targeted by the Belizean Government as a site for oil drilling. The citizens of Belize, led by the non-profit organization Oceana, rose up in a historic protest against the seismic testing going on […]

Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins by scientist and author Jonathan Balcombe. Do fishes feel pain? While it may seem obvious to some of us that they do based on their appearance, their behavior, and their membership in the group of vertebrate animals, many people […]

This episode of the InsideNATURE podcast is all about sloths–perhaps the strangest group of creatures evolution has ever produced. While other species get ahead by being the fastest, the biggest or the strongest, sloths do everything as slowly as possible, using the least amount of energy and remaining largely unnoticed. But don’t be deceived by […]

The vaquita is the smallest porpoise in the world and also the most endangered. Last year, a scientific survey determined there were about 30 vaquitas left in wild, down from the 60 or so found the previous year. With such low numbers, the species appears to be teetering on the edge of extinction, and scientists […]

In the latest episode of the InsideNATURE podcast, I spoke with filmmaker Joe Pontecorvo, producer of the recent NATURE film Yosemite. As the name suggests, Joe’s film is about Yosemite National Park, one of America’s oldest parks, nestled in the Sierra Nevada mountain range of California. The film features a diverse cast of animal characters including […]

In the latest episode of the InsideNATURE podcast, we speak with David Biello, environmental journalist and author of the book “The Unnatural World: The Race to Remake Civilization in Earth’s Newest Age”. The book details the many ways human activity has altered our planet, often for the worse, and examines efforts to rollback those alterations, or […]

What does it takes to make a ‘spy creature’ come alive? In the latest episode of the InsideNATURE podcast, we hear from animatronic designer John Nolan, who, along with his hardworking team, created the 30-plus robot spy creatures featured in upcoming NATURE mini-series Spy in the Wild (airing Feb 1st thru March 1st on PBS). The […]

This time of year one animal species gets all of the attention–that hardy, sled-pulling athlete of the North, the reindeer. To find out more about these cold-loving creatures, and their wild counterparts, the caribou, we turned to Justina Ray, senior scientist and executive director of the Wildlife Conservation Society in Canada. She filled us in on […]

Poking around on the beach, you may have encountered a hermit crab — a typically petite crustacean whose home is the shell it carries around on its back. Now imagine that tiny crab grew bigger and bigger until it could no longer find a large enough shell. With no means of defense, it develops a […]